A foothold on pain: A Pedorthist and Biomechanist, Art Smuckler tackles ailing feet

This is how a boy from Albany with bipedal matters on the brain hits the big time.

Be a fourth-generation shoe salesman with a rebellious streak. Split from your old man and go your own way. Learn how the human foot functions and what to do when it falters. Take that knowledge to help old people cross the street, among other things.

Then sit back and get a phone call like the one Art Smuckler received in 2000. It was a man from New York, a deep throat with a “high-profile” client whose dogs were not only barking, but biting. The client needed foot help – pronto.

“I thought maybe it was the president, I don't know,” says Smuckler, 53 (2004), of Niskayuna.

Soon after, the NBA star guard John Starks walks into Smuckler's Colonie office. Starks, in his 13th year playing pro ball and plagued by knee problems, was resigned to the fact his basketball career was over. “I know what your problem is, and I know how to help,” Smuckler tells Starks after studying his feet.

Starks, who had been through the rehab wringer, didn't believe him.

“I'll tell you what, how about when you shoot the ball it goes to the left, right?” Smuckler says.

“How the hell did you know that?” Starks says.

Smuckler is a certified pedorthist and biomechanist. What that means is that he's an expert on feet, how people use and abuse them. After studying each client – their feet and their body movement – he makes by hand individualized orthotics, which are shoe inserts tailored to align the foot, redistribute weight, reduce joint friction and give stability. Many of his clients are referred by doctors near and far.

Aching feet

About three out of four Americans will suffer some kind of foot ailment in their lifetime. Even minor alignment problems can wreak havoc on the knees, the hips and the lower back.

After Starks' orthotics were made, Smuckler made a fateful trip to New York City to hand deliver the devices at Madison Square Garden where Starks was playing that night with the Utah Jazz. The slumping Starks wore them in his shoes and was suddenly a hot shooter again. He scored 19 points that night.

Driving back to Albany after the game, Smuckler's cellphone rings.

“You're a good, man,” Starks tells him.

Thus, a star – in the orthotics world – is born…

“He extended my career,” says Starks, who helped put Smuckler on the pro athlete map. “I told Art I wish I would've ran into him early on.”

In addition to the 5,000 clients, he has regionally, Smuckler and his business, General Orthopedic, now help more than 100 professional athletes put their best foot forward -- including players from the NFL's Washington Redskins and the NBA's New York Knicks.

And before seven-time All-Star NBA center Alonzo Mourning announced Sept. 2 he would attempt a comeback with the New Jersey Nets this season, less than a year after a kidney transplant, who did he call?

Yup, Smuckler – the man who as a teen used to deliver shoes to Albany Mayor Erastus Corning.

A long line

Smuckler comes from a long line of foot entrepreneurs. Famous Shoe Store, owned by the Smuckler family for four generations, was an Albany downtown landmark until it closed last year. And Smuckler's father ran T. Arthur Cohen's, the former orthopedic shoe store, also downtown.

It was there that the young Smuckler learned what orthopedic shoes were all about. This was in the late 1960s. While other teens were questioning authority, Smuckler was questioning whether there might be more to all this shoe insert business than mere arch support. What about the heel? What about the mid-tarsal? He suspected something was amiss.

His father, in an effort to both satiate his son's curiosity and to get him out of his hair, sent the 16-year-old Smuckler to a summer program on orthotics and biomechanics. Smuckler sought to bring his knowledge back at the family business. Instead, he was often rebuffed, he says.

At 21, he made the break, first opening his own shoe store in Schenectady, which he closed a couple years later after a flood destroyed it, then taking over at Famous Shoe when his aging aunt retired. By the early 1980s, with Famous Shoe doing well, Smuckler branched out to pursue his real interest, opening General Orthopedic.

Into athletics

In the early years he specialized in designing orthotics for the elderly - specifically to improve their balance and reduce falls. “My original idea was, ‘Well, if you could make an elderly person feel this in control, OK, what would happen if you took a vibrant athletic individual and gave him the same control?’ That was in my head,” he says.

Mike Saunders, the athletic trainer for the New York Knicks, calls Smuckler the best in the business because of his ability to understand “biomechanics, anatomy and athletics. That combination,” he says, “has tremendous implications on other joints further up the chain and also the performance of the athlete.”

It's before dawn on Labor Day. Four men in masks are kicking up dust in General Orthopedic's workshop, located in a nondescript building on Central Avenue. One is Smuckler, sanding by hand a heel-shaped concoction.

The workshop has many of the markings of an old-fashioned cobbler's shop. Big, heavy, lathe-like steel machines hum. Instead of dealing in leather, however, Smuckler deals in plastics and sheets of foam of varying gauges, which he layers to fashion inserts that resemble foot-shaped relief maps with peaks and valleys. Relief, indeed.

Smuckler has no Web site. He places no ads. His business is all word-of-mouth. And the phone keeps ringing like never before.

“I never know who's going to be on the other end,” says Smuckler, who has two grown children and a wife, Tammy, of 32 years. “I'm just honored to be talking with anybody.”

Original article by: Felix Carroll, Staff writer – Publication: Times Union, The (Albany, NY) Page: D1, September 14, 2004.

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